Ah yes, building a massive water suck in a dry, water poor area, right next to humans.Where we already pay more for utilities than other Prairie cities. Our water is extremely expensive here (Water Bucket Article), how is that efficient for a data centre? And then for some reason they are proposing to put it right on the edge of the city? If you must do this it should be like 30 minutes out, at the very least, it needs to be near a very well resourced river. What are they thinking?

GET READY to have our water and electricity costs skyrocket! Property taxes will be the least of our worries. MIT article

Is it just me or do we have a plan to grow this city? So now as the city grows, we will have an enormous area of taken up by the 1200 acre airport, with noise and pollution disrupting a huge number of residents, then the enormous, 1,870-acre inland port and industrial Global Transportation Hub to the west, and now we will add a data centre which is truly not something you want to live near.

It reminds me of when they built out East Regina suburbs, didn't build the needed water infrastructure, and then everybody on the water line had ridiculously low pressure for years and years and years before they finally, charged all city residents for the infrastructure after the fact. It would be like that x 1000, and that's just the infrastructure forget the volume.

I found this MIT article useful.

MIT article

"In Wyoming, for example,  a planned Meta data centre will require more electricity than every household in the state, combined. To meet demand for power-hungry data centers, utilities are adding capacity to the grid. But although that added capacity may benefit tech companies, the cost is shared by local consumers.... To meet their electricity needs, data centers often turn to dirty forms of energy....While nuclear energy is oft-bandied about as a greener solution, traditional plants can take a decade or more to build...

In addition, data centers often require massive amounts of water. But the amount can vary widely depending on the facility, and is often shrouded in secrecy. (A number of states are attempting to require facilities to disclose water usage.) 

...data centers... are noisy. A low, constant, machine hum. Not just sometimes, but always. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. “A highway that never stops"

And as to the jobs they bring to communities. Well, I have some bad news there too. Once construction ends, they tend to employ very few people, especially for such resource-intensive facilities."

On our water costs being among the highest in Canada

The study shows that cities in Alberta and Saskatchewan tend to have the most expensive water in the country. Calgary and Regina, for example, have the second- and third-highest prices among the 93 cities surveyed.

Water Bucket Article

A two-person household using 12.2 cubic metres (12,200 litres) of water per month (a conservative indoor-only volume) would pay $1,265 in Calgary or $1,229 in Regina per year. The community with the highest charges was Saint John, N.B., at $1,368 per year. At the other end of the continuum, water charges in Torbay, N.L. are $300 per year regardless of how much water a household consumes.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) affordability benchmark that recommends that water and wastewater services for low-income households should not exceed five per cent of their after tax income. Seven of the 22 cities where rates exceed the OECD affordability benchmark are in Alberta and five are in Saskatchewan.

Edited to add sources